We put down our wine and settled in. I was aware — in the next few moments — only of the slight displacements of the burning logs as they shifted and hissed in the hearth, and the heat eating into my right calf. There was a clarity and concentration that I had not felt in some time, an opening of the senses that the approach of danger had provoked. I wore my customary gloves and accepted the traditional privilege of drawing the first card. The dealers moved to the others with a tactful deliberation, a slowness that was mesmerizing to me, and the room was suddenly extraordinarily quiet apart from the fire, like a chamber suspended hundreds of feet underwater. From some distant place I picked up the soft ticking of a wall clock. The second cards were dealt and we turned them simultaneously. I had scored a five. One of the Chinese had an eight. I had lost everything.
I sat back as the chips were taken from me and the great cobwebs of thoughts that had hung inside me for days began to tear apart and fall down. I stopped sweating; I became, on the contrary, completely dry and stationary and composed as I watched my money evaporate into another man’s maw. He was congratulated by all present, including myself. The staff were clearly a little sorry for me, or embarrassed at the consequences of my recklessness, and they waited for me to react, to move. When I did, they quietly asked me if I wanted to play again, but so quietly that it was inferred that it would be better if I didn’t. Luck was not with me.
As I went out into the vestibule I soaked up the soothing quietness, which was however immediately broken by a loud cheer emanating from one of the other pits. I felt a stab of jealousy, and I was sure that I caught the shrill alto of Grandma’s exultant war cry. Perhaps she had won the same amount that I had just lost. I walked on, asking the staff to dispose of the Adidas bag that was handed rather sorrowfully back to me. No matter. I went silently down to the gaming floors and then up again to the Sands casino buffet, where I ordered a rum and Coke and a roast beef sandwich. The floor show that night was a circus from Harbin.
At first there was no conscious thought that my gambling life had come to an end. I looked down at the slot machines at the daily height of their frenzy, the roulette wheels spinning like the cogs of a huge horizontal machine. On the stage, the acrobats in white bodysuits somersaulted through the holes of a tall contraption built to resemble an executioner’s scaffold. A large feline, white, was dragged across the stage by a chain. I ate two steaks from Asia’s longest buffet, drinking iced tea with them, and then felt the sounds of the casino receding inside me, the movements on the stage turning into blurs. I got up and went down to the main floor holding my head in my hands and threaded a way out between the Klondike and Lucky Slot machines. I wanted to get out of that clean, fetid, nauseating, pop-nothingness air and gulp in the taste of the sea sweeping in on crazy winds. I got to the doors and the staff bowed and I thought I could see, moving ardently toward me through the chaos of the hoi polloi, the head of a manager of some kind whose face was overwritten with the concerns of etiquette and the need for repeat customers. I turned and made off. A Rolls was parked outside the doors and a fabulous woman was rolling out of it like a wet noodle. The face was a mask of hard sugar. I didn’t want to know who it was. I walked away, out of the glare and into the late-afternoon pallor of the roads, across which the wind swept, waking me up again.
TWENTY-ONE
I took the ferry over to Hong Kong, the boat nearly empty. I felt deliriously happy, though I now had very little to give to Dao-Ming, and I was sure that she would understand. I felt anxious that I would now see her in her real element, without pretense, and that she knew that I was already familiar with this degraded milieu.
I had looked through the call girl websites like 141 that list their offerings by neighborhood, each girl offering a series of demure photographs and providing her cell number and address. There was a time when, driven by loneliness, I used to take the ferry over in the late afternoon and walk to Kimberley Road, where the Venus Sauna entertained many gamblers, and make my way toward Nathan Road until I came to a large and run-down complex called Champagne Court. The upper stories of this place were a warren of hundreds of single rooms of 141 girls, each door covered with stickers in Chinese with prices and recommendations, and sometimes blurred photos of the girls inside. When the girls were busy they hung a sign outside that said Please Wait, or Well Worth Waiting For. In here could be found women of offhand, sarcastic beauty, their rooms bathed in pink light and equipped with large mirrors. The men went from floor to floor, most of them young, wandering in the labyrinths where entire subcorridors were colonized by courtesans who decorated their ceilings with fairy lights and surveillance cameras. They waited in line to ring the bells that made musical sounds and to see the face peering from around the door. They stated their prices in Mandarin, these mainland girls in gartered stockings.
I had looked for hours on 141 until I found a Dao-Ming in Wan Chai. Most of the girls’ photos are heavily Photoshopped, and hers was no different. The skin smoothed out, the curves accentuated, the eyes made bigger. So that it might have been her and it might not. There was no phone number.
I took a cab to Pacific Place, had a drink at the top-floor bar of the Upper House to calm my nerves, and then walked down Queen’s Road on the right side until I found number 92. There was a brightly polished metal grille door, as is usual, but no buzzer for the apartments inside. It was right by a crowded bus stop. I had no cell phone so I had to wait until an old man came out with his dog, leaving the door open for a second and enabling me to slip inside. A steep flight of steps led up to the garden courtyard of the usual dismal squalor.
Around the courtyard were narrow apartments with folding grille gates, some of them open. The old ladies there cultivated scores of potted plants and diseased cats, and the cats and the plants lay together in the torpor of six p.m. as the light dimmed. I went from door to door trying to guess which one was the 141 girl called Dao-Ming. There was nothing on the first floor, so I climbed to the second. The grille of the corner apartment here was folded back and there was a red heart stuck on the door with the number 141, which is the usual sign that the punter has found his target. The door was plywood, with a peephole and a plastic garland nailed to it. Before ringing I listened for a while, my ear pressed close to the wood, and I heard a radio playing inside, Chinese pop music exactly like the kind I had heard during the phone call, and next to it the sound of a hair dryer. I pressed my hand against the door. The thought that it might be her was too enormous to control. And it was also too banal, too outrageous. I rang the bell.
The radio was turned off at once, followed by the hair dryer. Silence. I heard a woman in slippers come padding toward the door. I stepped back and smoothed down my hair, with the involuntary vanity that overcomes the john without his knowing it. The peephole darkened.
The eye was there. I hoped she could see me clearly in the fading light of the landing, in the graying light. But if she did, she didn’t open the door. She was thinking it over. Sometimes they will not open when they see a gwai lo. Our reputation precedes us. I stood there for some time and then I stepped forward again and pressed the bell. It seemed to make a god-awful noise that reverberated through the whole landing. The door snapped open and an ancient, skeptical face appeared.
“Yes?”
“I am here for my appointment.”
“Your what?”
“My appointment. I am Lord Doyle.”